Winter Run (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Ashcom, Robert. Winter Run. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books, 2002. 224 pages. Hardcover. $19.95. Readers who never tire of good coming-of-age stories will be much impressed with Robert Ashcom's Winter Run; those who require that such stories be steeped in the strong masculinist tradition of the attainment of manhood will be especially delighted with the work. Through a progression of nine hauntinglybeautiful, finely crafted stories encased by a prologue and a coda, Ashcom delivers a fresh, new portrait of boyhood and emerging manhood that is both moving and enduring. Winter Run, set on Silver Hill, a sprawling 700-acre farm in rural Virginia, in the late 1940s, concerns the growth of Charlie Lewis, a transplant from the city who must carve out his own niche in a strange time and place. Physically distant from his father who continues to work in the city and emotionally distant from his mother who is trying to make her own adjustment as an immigrant, young Charlie finds himself under the inspiration of the farm's owner, ProfessorJames, and in the immediate care of the black farm manager, Matthew Tanner. The reader follows Charlie through the crucial years of adolescence from about ages eight to fourteen, marking the joys and experiencing the pains that are such bittersweet aspects of coming-of-age. The book opens with a now grown Charlie Lewis standing over the hospital bed of his dying mother, Gretchen, wondering what to do, what to say, in this tragic moment of mutual need. Charlie's inability to offer comfort, and his mother's inability to distinguish between love and pity and to accept either, is an impasse that transports Charlie to memories of growing up an emotional orphan, a feeling he now realizes he has always had. In a sequence of perfectly individual but cleverly interlocking stories, Ashcom reveals the subtle nuances of Charlie's growth and development along with the pain, confusion, and joy of acquiring knowledge and values. Through alternating narrative voices—the intensely contemplative first person and the knowlingly objective third person—Ashcom delights with both the bewilderment and celebration of Charlie's coming-of-age. The stories are driven by the autobiographical impulse, the details ofwhich are nicely embedded in the larger 81 narrative and revealed by a mere sprinkling of clues. One especially delightful clue is Charlie's very prominent nose, inherited from his father, that bears a striking resemblance to the author's own nose. Charlie's manhood training is episodic, and the lessons run the gamut of male experience, from the comic to the mundane to the tragic. Whatever the phase, Ashcom's prose is lucid and powerful and invokes moods ranging from pensive to comic to celebratory. One especially hilarious episode is Charlie's close escape from a 600-pound boar. Having already been instructed that horses hate hogs, Charlie nevertheless rides his prize pony toward the chicken coop in a hardheaded attempt to jump over it into the hog pen. Because the horse indeed hates hogs, she stops short, and Charlie is promptly thrown into three feet of mud through which he must navigate his way to the nearest fence pursued by the boar and a supporting flank of sows. Of course, Charlie considers himself heroic. His mother and Matthew know, however, that he is merely foolish. Another episode focuses on the burial of old Bat, a one-eyed mule whose status is as legendary in Ashcom's Silver Hill as Brazzle's yellow mule is in Zora Neale Hurston's Eatonville. Charlie learns the importance of participation in a community of men and that living things are as important in death as they are in life. Still other episodes concern an out-of-control wild fire that Charlie's father successfully leads the fight against, much to Charlie's appreciation; the invasion of the woods by bulldozers instead of the usual men with saws and horses, a typically modernist construct that symbolizes a loss of innocence; and a "winter run," where a pack of wild dogs led by a "tan bitch" terrorizes the countryside in search of food during the "Great Winter" of 1950. Here Charlie...